Methods for automatically detecting whether a motor vehicle has incurred a traffic violation such as, for instance, exceeding the posted speed limit, running a red light or passing through a toll collection system without paying the toll, are widely used in various cities and metropolitan areas around the globe. Such systems determine whether a motor vehicle has infracted a traffic law and, if a traffic violation has occurred, a photo or video of that vehicle is captured using a camera system placed at that location so that the vehicle's license plate information is captured in the video or image for later use as evidentiary material in support of related charges or imputations. The license plate number is used to identify the vehicle's registered owner who, in turn, is issued a citation for the traffic violation. In many cases, the visual record of the owner's vehicle at the time of the traffic violation is also provided to the vehicle's registered owner with the citation. However, people whose image had been inadvertently captured in the photo or video of that motor vehicle by having, for example, been standing on a nearby sidewalk at the time the image was taken, have privacy concerns that their image or likeness had been captured without their consent. Such concerns are heightened in those instances when the photo has been provided to the vehicle's owner as part of their traffic citation. This is especially important in the age of the internet (world wide web) where photos can be easily uploaded online for anybody anywhere in the world to view and download.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are sophisticated systems and methods for processing an image or video captured by an automated camera system during a traffic violation such that content in that visual data which can be used for identification purposes of individuals other than the infractor is automatically removed from the image.